Zanuck invades Europe

Rating: Null/10 (28 August 2011)

"No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic." - A. Taylor
Before Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" collected all WW2 clichés and dressed them up in money, shaky-cam and faux black and white cinematography, producer and movie mogul Darryl F. Zanuck did the same with "The Longest Day", an expensive mega-production which hoped to capture the "spectacle, horror and sacrifice of Allied soldiers" during WW2 and D-Day.
Younger audiences raised on kill-a-second video games and indoctrinated in "Private Ryan's" sexy shaky-cam carnage will no doubt find Zanuck's production tame ("Where's the blood, man? I want more squibs!"), but virtually every sequence in "Private Ryan" is done here equally well, and at times better, though Zanuck's agenda is ultimately the same as Spielberg's: a celebration of movie technology, spectacle, action and glamour in the guise of deceitful notions of "humanism", "brotherhood", "humanity", "heroism", "honour", "sacrifice", "pride" and "country". And as Zanuck's films runs for almost 3 hours, scenes you've seen in other old B or A list WW2 movies pop up as well.
Though "The Longest Day" was directed by over five directors, its real auteur is Zanuck and so it manages to maintain a consistent tone and voice throughout. Most of it is aestheticized slaughter, though, war lovingly recreated, documentary style, for no reason other than to recreate, faithfully, war, documentary style. The idea here is that the images speak for themselves, but of course this is never the end result. It's less salacious and exploitative than "Ryan", but the ultimate effect is the same. And so we smile as a haggard John Wayne (draft dodger and armchair war-hawk) kills Germans and squirm as a brave Robert Mitchum guns his way up a beach. Sean Connery and Richard Burton's square jaws makes us proud, Henry Fonda's gentleness touches our hearts and we marvel at scene after scene of exciting, righteous murder, in which wrong-footed Germans (the film even makes a point about their shoes being on their wrong feet) are lovingly perforated. People die? Yeah, but we're dodging bullets by proxy, baby. Meanwhile, the truths of world wars 1 and 2 are brushed aside, thinking is admonished, myths and cosy iconography are reheated, and all history, nuances, complexity, ambiguities, politics and context are ignored.
Still, some of the film's moments are haunting. Zanuck's smoke shrouded cliffs and beaches are ghostly, haunting even, shots of corpses hanging from parachutes stuck in trees achieve a kind of macabre surrealism, and one long helicopter take into Ouistreham, in which a disembodied camera tracks a platoon as it guns its way across a river, over a bridge, into a town and then up a building, is special, echoing the floating cameras of Jancso's "The Red and the White" and Rosselini's "Garibaldi". There are other good moments, like one in which a group of nuns glide serenely through a gun fight, the nightmarish burning of St Mere Eglise, the film's overall look of grey, concrete and cement, and Zanuck's protracted beach landing (contrary to "Private Ryan", the landings weren't frenetic blood baths; the beaches were too big, forces separate and progress slow). The film's final shot, a helmet on a beach, would be re-textured with the final shot of Malick's "The Thin Red Line", a germinating coconut on a beach, death sprouting life. The sheer scope and scale of Zanuck's film is also overwhelming (his battlefield sets are spectacularly expansive, but not as turgidly so as other epics), and the film's production design is impressive. Again though, it's all technique.
Ironically, "The Longest Day" was part of a group of war films released between 1965 and 1977 ("A Bridge Too Far", "Tora! Tora! Tora!", "The Battle of Britain", "Battle of the Bulge", "Cross of Iron", "Patton", "633 Squadron" etc) which promised to broaden the scope of previous war films by focusing on as wide a cross section of the military as possible. In these films, generals, soldiers, sergeants, medics, lieutenants, Army personnel, Navy personnel, Airforce personnel, nurses, doctors, civilians etc, all came together in a kind of narrative cocktail, the entire military body working together to achieve some goal.
Unlike the platoon genre, these "heirarchal films" thus aimed to portray war on a far larger canvas. They promised to offer audiences the "spectacle of history", viewers being granted a nuts and bolts recreation of some historical event in which the entire hierarchy of the military machine took part.
Significantly, the event being recreated often revolved around some grand disaster: Pearl Harbour being attacked, Britain being blitzed, D-day going awry, the German advance in the Battle of the Bulge etc. These are all films in which noble Allies bravely fight against all odds (against an overwhelming, savage, superior foe), only to eventually emerge with a kind of bittersweet victory. These films thus display contempt and reverence in equal measure.
The last film in this cycle was "A Bridge Too Far" (1977), by which time audiences were tired of WW2. At this point a series of cathartic Vietnam films were realised, culminating in the angry sermons of "Rambo" and "Platoon". But covertly, all these films succumb to the Cult of the Military. The Cult which says that Freedom isn't free, and that the cost of freedom is blood which must be periodically sacrificed on the altar of Liberty by the military clergy. This kind of thinking tends to believe that we only have freedom because we are allowed it by the state, to whom we should therefore be devoted, obedient, unquestioning and grateful. Of course Zanuck's films were often propagandistic, from his Bible movies, to his Lincolm movie to his "The House of Rothschild's". He'd turn his hands to Pearl Harbour later.
7.9/10 - Simple war porn with impressive choreography, vast sets and careful set design. Worth one viewing.